Mastering Windows Server® 2008 Networking Foundations

Chapter 2. Building a Simple Network

In Chapter 1, you learned why you might want to network computers together. In this chapter, you'll begin to see how some of the pieces described in Chapter 1 fit together in a real-world scenario. You won't build anything complex in this chapter. However, these basics are important for the novice, so if this is your first time working with a network, you'll discover some amazing new things you can do with a computer system.

The goal of this chapter is to help you build a simple network, a network you can use to see how things work. This kind of network is an important first step to working with Windows Server 2008 because you can use it to build networking skills in a safe environment — one that isn't connected to the Internet or anything else for that matter. What we're trying to accomplish in this chapter is to answer these questions:

• Where do you obtain a free copy of Windows Server 2008 that you can use for testing?

• What do you need to do to make the two servers see each other?

• How do you set up user accounts for a basic setup?

• How can you share resources when working with a basic setup?

• Now that you have an account and shared resources on one server, how do you access them on another machine?

Note

This chapter assumes you have two machines that you can connect together to form a network. Because you're using the machines to perform only simple tasks, you don't need the latest product on the market — you only need a system that will provide the ...